That John Bell

There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.

Archive | Entrepreneur Mindset

Throughout day to day life there are a lot of negative and defeated people you encounter.

The upset retail worker who really wanted to be a nurse, the salesperson with a dream of owning a bicycle rental hut in the Caribbean, or the accountant who dreams of building an e-commerce empire.

If you ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, you’ll find there are very few children with ambitions of being an administrative assistant, database engineer, or pharmaceutical sales.

What happens between then, and now? What made us get where we are?

We grow up with our goals and dreams, then schooling breaks us down into productive assemblers. If you’re lucky you get to head into college with a vision of how you’re going to change the world.

But then something happens.

You have to start paying bills. So you get a job.

It’s not the best job, but it’ll do for now.. I mean, you have to fund your dream, right?

But then you get a raise.. cool, I’m making a little more money. What do I do? I decide to take my friends out for a night to celebrate, or if I’m making good enough money, I trade in my old used car.. after all, nobody wants that piece of junk anyhow.

You know, I never liked the color of that sofa, maybe the living room could use updating.

And the cycle goes, on and on, year after year.. decades down the road.

You find yourself in a place you never wanted to be, with nothing to show for it other than a car payment and some nice new hardwood floors.

SOMETHING IS WRONG, you shout.

This truly can’t be what life is.

This isn’t what you wanted, but how do you turn back?

You tell yourself you have no money, how can you survive with no money? You have a car payment, a house payment, the electric bill is due next Tuesday, and you’ve even thought about getting a second job, you know, “Just to get by.”

You can’t get a new job because you could never afford the pay cut, and you can’t go back to school because it’s far too expensive.

THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED, you shout.

It’s all a trap, you are stuck in this hampster wheel with nowhere to go.

BUT IT’S NOT

The reality is… it’s not actually rigged.

You’re not actually stuck.

You don’t actually have to have all of those things you think you need.

“She just got lucky” or “She’s from a famous family.” You think about those who seemingly were born into greatness.

“I wish I had those kind of opportunities, I would have done so much more.”

The truth is – You DO have those opportunities.

You CAN do so much more.

The person you’re idolizing, you’re following, whose every post you like and every tweet you retweet… they aren’t anything special. They didn’t fall from the sky as the master of the subject.

They just tried… they tried, really hard, they worked at it.

They made the decision that it is what they are going to do, and they did it. And when they couldn’t do it, they figured out a way that they could.

It’s easy to sit and think the system is rigged, that you’re stuck in your position and there’s no way out, that you couldn’t possibly achieve your goals because you don’t have the ___.

The reality though, is that it’s not rigged. You’re not stuck, and you do have the resources.

For most of us, growing up involves being told to go to school, to get into a good brand name college and you’ll get a nice job with a pension and life will be happily ever after.

As we get older, we start to realize that it isn’t quite that straightforward.

You go to school every day, get good grades, but then don’t get into that good college.. or you get into that college, get into debt, then still don’t find a job. Or you find a job, then a recession hits or the industry faces a downturn, and you’re lost without a job.

The more we go through life, the simple formula of “Go to school, get a job, happily ever after.” really starts to break down.

Once you break that illusion, life begins to change.. Steve Jobs said it perfectly:

“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world.

Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

What is he saying here?

Through life you grow up with this vision of some people being better than you, or stronger than you, or smarter than you… that there’s some unspoken reason that some people are successful and that you aren’t.

The thing is — there isn’t. There isn’t any reason other than that they’ve walked the path.

The only reason that somebody is ‘ahead’ or ‘above’ you.. is because they’ve taken action, they’ve done it. The only thing separating you from them, is that they have done it and you have not.

So how do you get there? How do you get from where you are, to where you want to be?